Pauper EDH

[Oversoul]

I occurs to me that I don't think there was any discussion of this variant at the CPA prior to me posting my first decklist. Now that I'm obsessed with Pauper EDH, I think it deserves a thread. First, the rules...

Pauper Commander is a variation of the original Commander format. Therefore, the following rules simply aim to define the unique characteristics of this format. If you’re new to commander formats altogether, you can find the rules for regular Commander here.

Commander
The commander must be an uncommon creature, vehicle, or spacecraft and does not need to be legendary.

Deck
The 99 cards in your deck must be commons.

Card Rarity
If a card has been printed at a specific rarity, it is classified under that rarity. This classification is based on paper and MTGO releases, excluding Arena.

Ban List
Mystic Remora
Rhystic Study

This is obviously inspired by the Pauper format, a format which I've mocked somewhat in the past. And, truth be told, I still don't really care for Pauper itself. My distaste for Pauper stems from two sources.

1. The unfortunate displacement of the Peasant format by Pauper. I consider Peasant to be the more interesting format, but Pauper has basically killed Peasant.
2. The hyperbolic rhetoric used by Pauper enthusiasts when they've attempted to evangelize for their format. I've seen a lot of quips about how Pauper is so great because some card that is banned in Legacy is legal there, with the blatantly silly implication that Pauper is less restrictive than Legacy.

And at first, I let my antipathy toward the Pauper format color my impression of Pauper EDH, even though the two actually don't have very much in common. It didn't help that the absurdity of MTGO "printings" meant a bunch of obviously rare cards were technically eligible to serve as commanders, something I found stupid. It also didn't help that some of the same breed of evangelist made spurious claims like Pauper EDH being more of an authentic old school Magic experience than actualy Old School EDH.

My attitude toward this variant was poisoned from the start. And that aversion was softened by one thing: a Scryfall search I did on a whim based on a comment found on this article: https://edhrec.com/articles/too-specific-top-10-multicolor-pauper-commanders-part-i

Here's the relevant exchange...

It surprises me that the Pauper Commander community went to "use all uncommon non-legendary creatures as your Commander" instead of going towards "meh, use whatever legendary creature (rare, mythic) you like for your commander and the 99 normal pauper style". If you deviate from Pauper anyway, then I'd assume the latter approach is more fun and more Commander?
But I guess it was to not create paywalls into an easily-affordable format (as we all know some powerful rare/mythic commanders are expensive). On that note, what is the most expensive uncommon creature and is it a good commander?

I think the idea was to create a format that felt totally different from normal Commander - you can legally make a deck with any commander that only uses commons otherwise in a normal game if you really want to, after all. So instead they created a unique format with a lot of strange depth to it that you never get to see. I think also that if they made a format where commanders were any rarity but cards are only common otherwise, you'd see even more of a focus on the commander to the exclusion of all else, since its power level would just be so hugely over the top compared to what you had in the deck.

The most expensive uncommon creature is probably the Summer Magic printing of Serra Angel, if that counts. But if we narrow it down to the most expensive uncommon that doesn't have a cheaper version available in another set, I believe the honor goes to Khabal Ghoul. I would imagine that Khabal Ghoul would be a lousy "commander" but I don't actually have any experience with this format.

From there, I left it alone for over five years. But when some friends in a local playgroup kept inviting me to play Pauper EDH with them, I said, "Well, if I'm going to play this format, I'm going to build a deck with that damn ghoul as commander."


This was a card that I don't think I'd ever seen anyone play in any format in my life. And it actually seemed kind of cool as a commander. So I put together my "Pauper Aristocracy" deck.

I played four games of Pauper EDH last week (three of them piloting this deck), and now I'm hooked on the format. Perhaps paradoxically, I still haven't warmed up to the mainline Pauper format. Without going into exhaustive detail on why I think that is, the prevalence of 4x staples in 60-card Pauper gives it what I consider to be a tedious character, while having a 100-card singleton deck an an uncommon creature as commander makes this variant feel totally different. Ultimately, Pauper EDH feels more like other restricted variants on EDH than it does like a variant on Pauper. And lowering both the starting life total and the commander damage threshold make for a tighter, more combat-heavy setting than regular EDH.

Most of the other guys playing at the table with me last week were trying this variant out for the first time, and all of us loved it. I'm working on four more PDH decks right now, so I'll soon have one for each color. I'll start threads for those decks eventually, but I wanted a space for discussion of the variant itself. So here we are.